Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine by Jesse Graves

In his
first collection of poems, Tennessee
Landscape with Blighted Pine, Jesse Graves takes the reader on a personal
tour of the places that inform his memories, his character, and his poems. Graves
skillfully guides his reader through cities as diverse as New Orleans, Ithaca,
NY, and Wrightsville Beach, NC, managing to locate in them one common
denominator—all their roads lead back to Sharps Chapel, Tennessee, the
hardscrabble home place of the Graves family for centuries, people who are as
much a part of the topography of Sharps Chapel and this book, as the native
trees and rivers that course through the lines of Graves’ poems.

While
the natural and spiritual landscapes of East Tennessee dominate this collection,
as the title poem suggests, this is not to say that Tennessee Landscape…should be considered a regional book exclusively.
In many ways these poems can be placed firmly in the tradition of Appalachian
poets from Robert Morgan to Jeff Daniel Marion, both of whom Graves considers
examples and mentors. In fact the lineage is quite clear in Graves’ “Facing
West from Cumberland Gap,” a poem written after
Robert Morgan, which draws some of its imagery from the same events Morgan
chronicles in his biography of Daniel Boone.
Similarities can also be seen between Morgan’s poem “Wild Peavines,” which
traces the natural affects the changing landscape of the Western North Carolina
Mountains has on its history, and Graves’ poem “The Road into the Lake,” which
considers the history of his family that was lost to a landscape changed by the
Tennessee Valley Authority. Graves’ speaker “cannot picture the walls as they
stood” before his family’s land became Norris Lake, anymore than he can see

..the lumberyard

on the
bank of Clinch River, where my

great-grandfather
strung timber into log rafts,

somewhere
now under the lake’s gravity.

This,
like many of the poems in Tennessee
Landscape is representative of Graves’ connection with his history, his
family, and his home, as well his recurring wish to better understand those
people and places that are part of him though they existed long before him. Although
Morgan likely has the most direct influence on Graves’ work as his advisor,
instructor, and mentor at Cornell University, Graves’ themes of familial
relationships, connections with previous generations, and ties to the land are
more reminiscent of Marion, particularly the poems of his own early collection,
Out in the Country, Back Home. There
can be no question that this similarity is the result of not only a close
friendship between the two poets, but also the proximity of the home-places
from which each of them draws inspiration.

Graves
celebrates his Appalachian heritage in the lines of the collection’s title poem
among others. He introduces the reader to the origins of his book, people and
places that pre-date him by two hundred years, in the second of seven sections
of “Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine,”

No one came here to build the perfect city,

They came out of Philadelphia and before that
New York,

Before that Baden-Baden and the Palatinate.

A narrow river unspooled out of the mountain,
Alamance County,

Western Carolina, and washed them up

Before what must have seemed God’s own promise:

Tall
fescue and cleft hoofprints of deer on the muddy banks.

Here they would harvest what grew, tear life
out of the ground.

More
important, though, is the introduction he gives to his own relationship with
this land,

Here once was a boy running with a black and
white half-shepherd dog,

Hair summer blond, hands darkened to rust by
wet clay

Rummaged for arrowheads.

No fear then but the darting tongues of timber
snakes:

That certainty lost to whatever passes for
time,

The ground
skipped beneath his feet,

As well
as to that of its people:

The dead move through us at their will, their
voices chime

Just
beyond our hearing.

How else do we feel our names when no one
speaks them?

How else do we catch the echo of footprints two
decades

After
running through the grass?

Alone in the field, and never alone. Quiet and not quiet.

Home and
away.

Perhaps
more than any other poem in the collection, “Tennessee Landscape with Blighted
Pine” embodies the spirit of this collection of poems, making it an appropriate
choice for the title poem.

While
Graves clearly has a place in the Appalachian poets’ family tree, his work
certainly has broader appeal. Always true to his concern with the sense of
place, Graves’ poems retrace his steps as a young man leaving home for the
first time, allowing the reader to travel with him to Ithaca and New Orleans.
The poems inspired by these places are no less vivid than his poems of home and
the poet seems to examine his relationship to these places with as much
scrutiny as his examines his relationship to Tennessee. In “The Night Café: North Rendon, New
Orleans,” a café where “most of the tables leaned vacantly against their chairs
/ The walls exhaling a low shade of green, the kind of room / Van Gogh said a
man could lose his mind in,” Graves’ introspective speaker questions

Always into further obscurities and personal
abstractions,

Tenderness for the women we loved before our
wives,

How those romances added up to lives someone
chose against;

Entire books we conceived in dreams, but did
not write…

and
ever concerned with the story history will tell, concludes with “the hope of thereby preserving from decay
the remembrance / Of what men have done.”Similarly, Graves constructs (and
deconstructs) his personal history in places and poems like “Wrightsville Beach.” His description of the beach, with its

…foam

of low tide, its spool of dark thread

arriving like the wet shadows of clouds.

Three red echoes of light in the harbor,

only sign on life beyond the smashed pier,

entrance roped off, further quarter lost,

splintered legposts jutting from waves.

Shells the size of baseballs pock-marked

The sand, their uneven curves preserved,

Concentric ridges crusted with salt-grit,

is spot
on, as are the descriptions of the natural settings of most of his poems. However, what is most impressive about
his nature poems is the interplay the speaker has with his
surroundings—interplay that takes the poems beyond mere description, beyond
celebration of earth, ultimately givingthe poems their highest meaning. Graves achieves that higher meaning as
“Wrightsville Beach” turns on the moment his speaker steps on a shell, a moment
Graves describes,

One found the soft skin above my heel,

pink-lobed conch shell—

crescent
moon imprint, blood tattoo.

For the
reader, the shell and its “blood tattoo” serve to represent the lasting
impression that was left on the poet not only by the moon and tide, but also by
the person with whom he is taking his early walk, even if she is only present
in his thoughts. For the speaker, the shell serves as a physical reminder of
her significance and perhaps as a remembrance of an earlier, easier time in
their relationship. Bound to
capture the moment, preserve the history Graves tell us,

I brought that shell home, and now it sits

Harmless on my desk beside a picture of you.

I wonder if I could find you name written

Between my hymns to Rilke and the Red Sox

In my misplaced journal of those seaside days.

When I sensed you a rising presence,

Tropical depression bearing in off the coast.

Though
the bustling streets of New Orleans and the coast of North Carolina bear no
resemblance to the mountains of East Tennessee, Graves relies on his affinity
with nature to guide him through the lines of these poems which describe a
landscape far different than the one of his youth. Graves embraces the gifts
nature offers in a moment, realizing (like A.R. Ammons) that he can never take
the exact same walk on Wrightsville Beach again.

Two of
the central concerns in these poems are grief of losing a family member, and
the sense of disturbance when a landscape or community is displaced, concerns Graves
addresses in “The Road into the Lake” and “For Richard Wilbur,” a poem as much
about Graves’ grandmother as it is about Wilbur himself. Graves describes his
grandmother, who shared a birthday with Wilbur, as …”truly lost, the woman who
named me, her breath, / her body, the stories she rarely told about herself, /
the unknown, never-praised, backward girl of springtime.” Of course both of
these concerns lend themselves to the elegiac form, and Tennessee Landscape…can certainly be considered a collection of
elegies, given the contemporary definition of the genre. One function of the
elegy is to situate an abstract sense of loss within a particular moment or
image, or in the case of “Piano Key,” in a tangible object. Graves’ speaker
mourns the loss of his grandmother, and perhaps a relationship he never had
with her, while sitting at her “unpolished piano.” Although it is now little more than a “corner fixture in the
attic, collector of light debris / Bookshelf for old home décor magazines,” that
“no one mentions her playing, though the keys / Lost their gloss somehow,” this
poem’s speaker realizes that something was lost with his “father’s mother” that
will never be retrieved, and he wonders,

Little key, did she bring you to life with a
touch

Same as she did my father?

Were you
part of a night time song

She kneaded into dreams for her sleeping
children?

Song I’ll never hear, white peg bent to
silence.

Graves
expresses a similar sense of longing and loss for people and events in his past
in his poems, “Johnson’s Ground,” “Devil’s Snuff,” and “Digging the Pond.”

Jesse
Graves says of his own work, “I think that whatever is most deeply ingrained in
a poet is his or her truest subject matter.” Clearly the fields and rivers of
Sharps Chapel, Tennessee and the people who made this place his home are most
deeply ingrained in this poet and certainly in the pages of this book. Whether looking back to an idyllic
childhood filled with “Cokes,” and “bags of peanuts” at “Big Ellum Point,” or
questioning his role as an adult in the home on which he places so much
importance, it is this connection to family and home, this sense of questioning
one’s place in it, that draws me as a reader.

His
poems deal almost exclusively with landscape and nature in some way,
particularly those places associated with having grown-up in the country.
Graves, as I do, represents the generation of Appalachians whose families clung
to an Agrarian lifestyle, but didn’t depend on it for their livelihood, who
broadened their horizons in Detroit factories or behind the wheel of
north-bound semi-trucks, but were back home on Sunday for preaching and
dinner. We are a generation who,
in many ways, must dig deeper to discover our roots and determine where we fit
in a place where values, morals, and traditions struggle to keep up with the changing
attitudes of people. This sense of questioning in Graves poems appeals to me,
makes me feel as though there is a place in the tradition of Appalachian
people, of Appalachian poets for those of us who chose to construct our
heritage differently than the generations before us.

Catherine Pritchard Childress lives in the Appalachian
mountains of East Tennessee. She
received her M.A. in English from East Tennessee State University, where she
served as editor of The Mockingbird Literary/Arts
journal. Her poems have appeared
or are forthcoming in North American
Review, The Connecticut Review, Louisiana Literature, Cape Rock, Still: The
Journal and Town Creek Poetry among
other journals and have been anthologized in Southern Poetry Anthology: Tennessee Poets.